Holiday Shopping for True Happiness

A friend of mine reports for work at Target on Thanksgiving, 11:30 PM.  They are ready with extra security.  Only thirty people can enter the store at a time.  There are even line judges, to prevent jumping.  Oh, the humanity!

Me, I will do my shopping right here in the very chair in which I am writing this post.  Save your hippocampal glial cells damage from your overactive HPA axis!  Save your toes!  Internet!

Oh, and because this year's flu shot missed, this week's blog post is a rerun, dedicated to the topic of shopping for, of all things, meaning. 

From Friday, December 17, 2010,

Holiday Shopping for Loonies and Normals Alike

 

Last year I got an earlier start with my efforts to help you purchase the perfect Chanukah/Kwanzaa/Christmas present.  Here are the links, one for your favorite loonie, the other your favorite normal.  The first is even diagnosis specific.  The most popular pick turned out to be a bluetooth phone for the one who talks back to his/her voices, but is trying to pass.

This year, regular readers know that I have been living and breathing gingerbread.  So this post, like my own shopping, comes late in the season -- Chanukah has passed us by.

Internet.  God bless the internet.

And what with last week's post on happiness fresh in my mind, this year's holiday shopping picks combine the two issues -- where to get what makes for true happiness on the internet.  No, really!

The Sources Of Happiness

Martin Seligman's Authentic Happiness identifies three major sources of happiness, pleasure, engagement and meaningfulness.  So here are suggestions to enhance all three for your favorite loonie or normal.

Let's address one issue first.  Life circumstances, beyond having the essentials, are not really that important an influence on the measure of ones happiness.  But poverty does matter.  If the one you love lives in poverty, go to Amazon.com's gift card section, where you can find gift cards for clothing stores, restaurants, general retail, entertainment and more.  Give us bread, but give us roses are lyrics of a working women's song from the early 20th century.  It's nice, when you are poor, to have the opportunity to choose which is the higher priority this week.

Pleasure

Well, yes.  Feeling good makes you feel good. 

On the other hand, have you seen that bumper sticker, The one who dies with the most toys wins?  That bumper sticker is an example of irony.  I hope it is an example of irony.  I am sure the person who came up with it meant it ironically.  It is possible that the person on whose Lexus SUV you saw the bumper sticker might have missed the point.  That would be sad.

Irony means that the bumper sticker is not true.  The one who dies with the most toys does not win.  I just wanted to make that clear.  Of the three top sources of happiness, pleasure, engagement and meaningfulness, pleasure ranks lowest on the list, happiness producing-wise.  Our mindless pursuit of it notwithstanding.

Nevertheless, perhaps the heart's desire of the person for whom you are shopping is toys.  There are all kinds of toys out there.  Almost all of them, you can find, again, at Amazon.com.  I thought they were a book store.  No, from Automotive to Watches, with books, electronics, movies and even musical instruments between.  If you know what that heart's desire is, you can probably find it there.  If you don't know what that heart's desire is -- are you noticing a theme developing here? -- gift card.

Yes, I know.  This reads like an infomercial for one particular corporate giant that is destroying local businesses across America.  But give me a break.  And give yourself a break.  Your Chanukah presents are already late.  Christmas and Kwanzaa are bearing down like a runaway train.  I don't have time to look up a bunch of choices for you.  I have my own shopping to do.  Internet.

Who am I kidding?  I can't go into stores anyway unless medicated.  Maybe you can relate.  At least I have the Rx!

Engagement

Engagement means being absorbed in the here and now, whether in family, romance, work or hobbies.  That being absorbed is the key, because the wandering mind is an unhappy mind.  Gifts that bring the family together, or send your recipient out on a date or relate to his/her interests can enhance that person's happiness.  And you can find just the gift or gift card at... what has evidently become the Shameless Commerce Division of Prozac Monologues.

Meaningfulness

Okay, all the above is filler.  Here is what I really want to sell this season.  Making a difference.  What makes for meaning is using one's personal strengths to serve some larger end (Seligman's definition.)

One kind of strength is passion.  So let's start with a question.  What is the passion of your gift recipient?

I knew an old lady once who absolutely would not deal with that word passion.  It's a wonder she reproduced.  Like Queen Victoria, she probably closed her eyes and thought about England.  Or, being American (and Episcopalian), she probably thought about The Book Of Common Prayer.

So here is an alternative for Thelma, God rest her soul, and for you if you can't relate to the word passion.  Determination.  What is the determination of your gift recipient.  What is he/she determined to support/challenge/change/make possible in the world?

Now let's go shopping for meaning.

Clean Water For Africa

Here is my passion/determination story.  The Episcopal Diocese of Iowa has a companion relationship with the Diocese of Swaziland.  Swaziland has had a drought for a decade or so.  There are things that could be done.  But the king has about a hundred wives, and he can't play favorites, can he?  If one has a Mercedes Benz, then each have to have her own Mercedes Benz...  So who can afford to dig wells?

But then this guy in Southeast Iowa developed this technology that turns table salt into chlorine.  For $150, we could get this thing called a chlorinator that produces enough chlorine to give clean water to an entire village.  [Here is an update from the original article about how the system works.]

Well, heck.  I'll buy two!


We took a lot of them over.  Now the Swazis are making them in country.  One year a mission team came back from Swaziland with the story.  An elder from one village had told them, 

Since we got the chlorinator, not one child died last year.

Not one child died last year.

I have never spent any amount of money that has ever given me and will forever give me as much happiness as those six words.

Not one child died last year.

Give your mother or your father this story and clean water for a whole village in Africa right here.  Now we are doing Haiti, too.

NEWS FLASH November 26, 2011 -- This just in from Earl Ratcliff, the inventor:

As you noted the cost of our CPU WAS $150.  The Lord has been good to us.  We've been able to reduce the cost to $50.  Assembly time went from 1 1/2 hours to 10 minutes and from 20 pieces to 6.  Plus overall quality has improved.

So that is how this year's holiday gift-giving guide is going to work, using one's personal strengths/passions/determinations to serve some larger end.

Shopping To Serve A Larger End

UNICEF

So look again, more deeply this time at those pleasures.  Do you have a friend who loves camping?  Insecticide treated mosquito nets are a bargain for $18.57, delivery included to places in Africa where one person dies of malaria every 30 seconds.

How about a friend who bakes?  High energy biscuits will feed young children in disaster sites, 600 for a mere $24.98, again, delivery included.

You can find these and a whole assortment of Inspired Gifts for the health, water, nutrition, education and emergency needs of children around the world at unicef.org.

Heifer International

How about a gift that keeps on giving?  Heifer International provides livestock and training to improve nutrition and generate income, lifting families out of poverty.  Recipients share the offspring with others in the community, multiplying the impact of each gift.

So do you have a friend who wants a pet but is allergic?  Three rabbits, $60.  Aaahh, aren't they sweet?!  We bought bunnies for China one year.  Hunger has been wiped out in China.  Heifer International has moved on to another country.

Do you know a cowboy wannabe?  One heifer, $500.

How about a whole ark with two cows delivered to a Russian village, two sheep to Arizona, two camels to Tanzania, two oxen to Uganda, two water buffalo to Cambodia...  There are fifteen pairs in all for $5000.  For your friend who is delusional?  (Noah/end of the world/delusional -- get it?)

We are just getting started.  Knitters, a knitting basket (llama, alpaca, sheep, angora rabbit) -- $480.  Gourmet, cheeses of the world (how cool is that! heifer, goat, sheep and water buffalo) -- $990.  Homesick Iowan, pig -- $120.  Let's not neglect our vegan friends, trees -- $60.


If you are shopping for me, I have long had my eye on that water buffalo, a mere $250.

All of these are available in shares, by the way, if that fits your budget better.

Seriously.  Water buffalo. 

Habitat For Humanity

Now let's return to where this series started and my life for that last two months, Habitat for Humanity, building affordable housing by using volunteers, including those who will own - and pay for - the houses.  Whether your designated gift recipient is Martha Stewart or Frank Lloyd Wright, Habitat has its own gift catalog with everything from light switches to flooring.  One year my sister-in-law gave me a kitchen sink. 

One.org

If I haven't hit a bulls eye yet, one.org is the meaningfulness equivalent of amazon.com.  This one may appeal to the rockers in the crowd.  Cofounded by Bono, Bob Geldof, et al, one.org created a partnership of all sorts of groups working to eliminate world poverty by 2015 -- the Millenium Development Goals.

Here you will find more about one.org.  Here you will find the partners (Bread for the World, Oxfam, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, various churches, etc.)  Each one has its own focus, allowing you to find your perfect match.

And since this is my blog, after all, I will put a word in for Episcopal Relief and Development, ER-D.  When earthquake or hurricane strikes, ER-D listens to local people to determine how best to help.  Then they stay with it after the cameras move on.  For example, ER-D is still working on economic redevelopment in New Orleans.  And this is one church organization you can support that will NOT ask potential recipients where they go to church.

Joy That Lasts

So there you have it.  Without leaving the comfort of home, without even having to change out of your jammies, you can find the perfect gift, one that will give joy beyond the end of the year.

Not one child died last year.

photo of Hindenburg in the public domain
clipart from Microsoft

cotton candy photo by Maggie D'Urbano,

used under the Creative Commons License (cropped)

child with unsafe water by Pierre Holtz - UNICEF, licensed under Creative Commons

child drinking well water by Scott Harrison licensed under Creative Commons
mosquito netting by Tjeerd wiersma, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license
photo of rabbits by Kessa Ligerro and made available under the GNU Free Documentation License 
Entrada dos animais na arca de Noé by Giovanni Benedetto Castiglioni, public domain
photo of water buffalo by Da and made available under the GNU Free Documentation License
GNU -- somehow seems appropriate, doncha think?  

Narrative and the DSM

My therapist once picked up the DSM and said, This could be called The Book of Behaviors That Make Therapists Nervous.

An apt description.  It is filled with descriptors: adjectives, behaviors, impulses, thoughts, feelings that are all human adjectives, behaviors, impulses, thoughts and feelings.  Almost none of them are strange in and of themselves.  Almost all of them are familiar to all of us.

It's just that at some point, when these descriptors add up, somebody starts to get nervous.

Diagnosis -- Recognizing Deviation From The Norm

I Told Them I Was Sick - DSM Revisited

Have you heard about the man whose tombstone read, "I told them I was sick"?

A New Diagnosis Or Two

So, the docs earned their big fee and the Pension Fund got its money's worth out of this three-day psychiatric evaluation.  I have a couple new diagnoses.

That is really not so remarkable.  If you attend a Peer to Peer course, NAMI's signature ten-week self-help program for loonies, you know this.  One week, the participants go round the circle and tell their diagnoses, or rather, their history of diagnoses.  Most trace a whole tour through the DSM, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual.

Where Diagnoses Come From

Support the Troops - Stop Shopping

So I am back from getting my head examined, that three day intensive evaluation.  I had my doubts about this enterprise.  At my most anxious, my therapist reminded me I would get air miles.  That would be something, at least.  To my surprise, I also received some surprises.  And the experience was worth a couple of blogposts.  This one will be about PTSD, or make reference to it.  Next week we will play with the DSM.

I start at the Hilton.  Well, before that, my pension plan, which is how I ended up at the Hilton, not to mention how I ended up getting a three day psychiatric evaluation at the Gabbard Center, which does not usually happen for loonies in my tax bracket. 

Decent Benefits For People With Mental Illness? 

The Episcopal Church Pension Fund was established by one of the biggest robber barons of the 19th century, J.P. Morgan, doing penance for his sins.  Like how Charles and David Koch aren't.  Since then, clergy have put the equivalent of a whopping 15% of our salaries into the fund.

Unlike United Airlines or General Motors, this retirement fund is not run by people who have the option of stealing it by threatening to close up shop unless the pensioners just hand over their hard-earned savings to increase the compensation of the CEOs.  The shop being the Episcopal Church.  Plus for some reason, in defiance of the way managed mutual funds work in the real world, the Pension Fund beats its performance indexes year after year after decade after decade.  Maybe this has something to do with karma.  Maybe the angels.  Choose your metaphysical system.  Whichever, for me, this is good.

As a consequence, my disability pension comes from one of the last defined benefit plans in America.  And it regularly has to come up with ways to spend its excess revenues, like by providing good benefits for its disabled beneficiaries, even those whose disability is of the loony variety.

And since the people who manage that much money are used to staying in places like the Houston Hilton, then that is where they put up their loony beneficiaries when we are getting our heads examined.

Which is how I came to spend four days there, two blocks north of the Galleria. 

Galleria As A Tourist Attraction 

Malls called Galleria don't have stores with names like Old Navy.  They have stores with names like Giorgio Armani, Christian Dior, Chanel, Louis Vuitton, Saks, Baccarat, Tiffany's, Cartier, De Beers.  A whole store called De Beers, for God's sake.

Galleria is where the restaurants are, where we went when we were tired of sitting next to tables at the Hilton where we had to overhear earnest mentors training earnest mentees for their presentations to their big clients.  The oil companies were meeting at the Hilton.  Down the street, Bechtel was meeting at the Westin.  Bechtel is the construction company to the Saudi monarchy.  So it may be the timing was not a coincidence.

We walked to the Galleria.  The neighborhood isn't really designed for walking.  Houston is more of an internal combustion engine kind of place.  So as we picked our way through parking lots, we overheard a father and young son comparing their Beemer to the Beemer they parked next to.  We dodged  Maseratis and Mercedes while crossing streets.  Well, you get the idea.  There was a closer restaurant.  But the doorman appeared to be wearing Kevlar under his vest.  Well, you get the idea.

One of my docs, making small talk as we entered her office, asked if I was getting to look around Houston in the off hours when I wasn't getting my head examined.  I said, No I am too tired.  Except, we went to the Galleria.  She responded, Well, THAT's something! 

It was something alright. 

Galleria As A Mental Health Hazard 

One evening on our way toward sushi, a young man held out soap samples.  I said, No thanks, I don't do scents.  Then he grabbed my hand.  Okay, he asked permission.  I see your nails are clean.  You don't paint your nails?  No I don't.  Let me show you something.  So he explained about ridges and natural oils while he did his flirty little small talk and buffed one of my nails.  Now don't scream when you see the results.  Indeed, the nail was beautifully shined, and made the notion of painting nails seem cheap.  I agreed it was beautiful and said I was not going to buy the buffer anyway.  Why not?

Because I don't buy things. 

That took some explaining, both to him and to myself, since I had never said those words before.  He decided I had made a life style choice.  Well, okay.  That would be one way to look at it.

But it was more like a commitment than a choice, made then and there.  I would no longer buy things.

Don't get me wrong.  I am as fem as they come -- short of destroying my feet in those instruments of torture that women willingly put on their feet nowadays.  Evidently, all that work we did in the 1970s to get women to love ourselves was a waste.  In other cultures, women are forced to deform their feet.  Having stopped in the 70s, now we do it again.  In the US, we call that freedom.

Where was I?  Oh yes -- I found those beaded dresses in the Gucci windows quite lovely.  And I have some beaded things in the back of my closet from pre-loony days.  Maybe not pre-loony, maybe just not-yet-identified hypomanic days, who knows.

But tripping past them, dodging the Lexus SUVs, all of that, I felt this growing sense of doom about the American way of life.

What The American Way Of Life Costs 

I couldn't shake the images of three young men.  One is a friend of my son's, who came home from Iraq with a TBI and PTSD.  Another is a relative with a couple tours of duty in Afghanistan and a troubled marriage.  The third is a young man I counseled, who signed up, hoping to come home a hero in a box. 

Support the troops, people say.  Support the ones who are protecting our freedom.  Freedom to shop at Galleria.

There I was, surrounded by the way of life they were protecting at the cost of their brains and their families and their lives.

It is too high a cost.

It is too high a cost.

These thoughts, coming in the midst of getting my head examined, make me think we need to get America's head examined.

Money, Military and Mental Health

This isn't a political blog.  I do advocacy about mental health issues.  I am not here to plug political opinion.

This is not an opinion.  This is a photograph.


 

This is another photograph.

And here is another.





 
And now we return to the shoes.

As I look at one picture, then another, as I listen to those young men, and then to the people in that restaurant next to me, I do have an opinion.  Here it is.

These shoes cost too much.

They cost too much.

Actually, I don't think this is about mental health, after all.  It is a sickness of the soul. 

What Is The American Way Of Life? 

I did meet some very nice people at the Houston Hilton.  One man was from Ethiopia.  He drove the shuttle, and we got to know each other in twenty-minute conversations each day on the way to the Gabbard Center.  He came to this country because he wanted opportunity.  And he found it.  He drives a shuttle bus.  His eldest is a policeman.  His daughter is about to graduate from college, and his youngest about to enter.  He doesn't need a Maserati to have the American way of life.

The other shuttle driver came to the US during the war in El Salvador.  We talked about Archbishop Romero, and the strength we still get from his witness.  If I remember right, somebody gave Archbishop Romero a pair of shoes for his consecration.  People gave him lots of things, but his friend asked him what he wanted, and he said shoes.  This former refugee, now shuttle driver, also found the American way of life.  Emphasis on life.  He doesn't need a Lexus. 

Freedom And Addiction 

People say our young men and women are sacrificing their minds and their bodies to protect our freedom.

We need to protect our freedom ourselves.  We are not free.  We are addicted.  Addiction is a disease of the soul.  And it is progressive.  The more you feed it, the worse it gets.

Our freedom begins when we acknowledge our addiction for what it is. 

Step One -- We admitted we were powerless over our addiction - that our lives had become unmanageable.

I don't want those shoes.  But I do want that beaded dress.  And having resisted it, having told that young man I don't buy things, the very next day I still almost bought an Eileen Fisher sweater at Nordstrom's across the street.  Because it was on sale.

Just in time I remembered those three young men.  That sweater cost too much. 

My Bit For The War Effort 

PTSD, Post-Traumatic-Stress-Disorder is bankrupting the defense budget.  Researchers are trying to figure out how to prevent it.  Does it take a neuro-scientist to figure out that you prevent Post Traumatic Stress Disorder by preventing the trauma?

I have decided to support the troops the way the troops do, by caring about what happens to their buddies and acting to prevent harm from coming to them.  I will not wrap a flag around my shoulders nor post one on my facebook page for Veterans' Day.  I will hold before me the faces of those three young men, and wrap myself in my love for them.

I will work the Steps, always remembering that I am just as addicted to things as any of you.

With God as my higher power, the next time I buy something, it will be a bicycle.  So I can leave my Civic in the garage.

photo of J.P. Morgan by Edward N. Jackson and in the public domain

photo of Bacarrat Chrystal Sculpture used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License 

photo of Maserati, Gran Turismo by Rudolf Stricker and usedunder the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License

photo of Louis Vuitton shoes used under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic license

photos of medical evacuation and coffins in public domain 

Getting Shrunk

I'm off this week to get my head examined, so am taking a break from using it.  This would be your opportunity to examine the many features of Prozac Monologues.  Here is a brief tour of the site and some tips for cyber-dinosaurs.

The basic breakdown: on the left are mental health and medication resources.  To your right are helps to navigate around the site, plus some fun stuff.

Text that appears in tan is a link to somewhere else.  The links on the left are to sites outside Prozac Monologues.  Most on the right go somewhere on the blog itself.  Notice in particular the feature called Labels.  If you click on a word in that list, several past posts on the same subject will appear.  The bigger the word, the more often I have written on it.  The right side also includes videos that change occasionally and sometimes coordinate with the current post, and sometimes not.  Ditto the Word of the Week.

The text in the middle is the new stuff I try to write once a week, weather and brain waves permitting.  Again, the tan text links to something else.  It could be a research article, an Amazon.com review, another blog, or an earlier Prozac Monologues post.

Below each post are some icons.  Click on comments to read other peoples' comments or add one of your own.  Click on the envelope to email the post to somebody else.  Click on one of the letters to share the post with whatever social media you use.  Click on the number to bring the post to the attention of the cyber world.  I don't actually know how that feature works.  Can somebody tell me?  Then there are more labels, links to other posts that deal with similar matters.  At least, I think they are similar matters.

That's enough to keep you busy while I spend the week filling out bubbles on instruments of torture devised by psychologists, and telling my tale of woe to psychiatrists who have heard worse, even if I can't imagine it, and who think they can come up with a new idea that my own doctor hasn't come up with, though I can't imagine that either.

Catch you later...

flair from facebook.com

Mental Health Day -- The Funner Version of Advocacy

Last week it was Mental Illness Awareness Week, according to NAMI.  So today it's World Mental Health Day, according to WHO.  The World Health Organization, that's WHO.

That's a week for mental illness, a day for mental health.  Whoever organizes these things must be reading my mood chart.

I cycle within cycles.  In the larger circle, I have been able to maintain a stable state for a while now -- the state of jaded, that is.  So I take up this week where I left off last week, continuing the repost of a series on the sorry state of mental health advocacy.  This second post takes a glass-half-full approach.

Not exactly mental health, but at least the upside of mentally interesting.  I mean, we got these diseases for life.  We might as well learn to make them work for us.

Mental Illness Awareness Week - Because We Are Really Good at Delusional

Imagine this -- Somebody from NAMI attends one of those campaign events and gets to the microphone.  Intending to ask about the candidate's views on funding for community mental health, this poor parent begins with a statement: 

People with severe mental illness die on average twenty-five years before everybody else.  They have the expected lifespan of Somalia. 

Nowadays the crowd will cheer.  But that particular youtube wouldn't go viral.

I am jaded about this Mental Illness Awareness thing.  It will not be subjected to any Best Practices evaluation.  NAMI and the pharmaceutical industry have been making us more aware of mental illness for decades now.  The numbers on prejudice have not budged.  They have not budged.

That negativity -- does it mean I am currently displaying symptoms or that I have done my research?  Both, actually.

I'll cop to the irony here.  I myself was a speaker at one of those Mental Illness Awareness Week events once, held on a Sunday night in a not-much-traveled portion of a university campus.

It was very moving, the candles and all that.  And it did raise awareness, in the sense that it made those of us who were there, people with mental illness and those who love us aware that we are not alone.  But did it increase funding for research and treatment?  Did it reduce prejudice?  I don't think so.

Let me answer that another way.  Did it increase funding for research and treatment?  Did it reduce prejudice?

Nope.

So symptoms, research, irony and all, my contribution to Mental Illness Awareness Week is a repost of what I think we ought to be doing this week.  And next.  And next. 

From Friday, March 11, 2011:

Ignore/Laugh/Fight/ -- Mental Health Advocacy That Wins

If they don't want to employ you, if they are afraid of you, if there are four times as many of you in jail as in the hospital, then it's not just stigma.  It is prejudice and it is oppression.

The twentieth century offered a whole degree program in prejudice and oppression.  Others have made progress against what beat them down.  Though we are now stalled and falling behind, we can move forward when we adopt their methods.

The Map to Liberation

Mahatma Gandhi was not the first freedom fighter.  But he is the great theoretician.  He gave us the map.

First they ignore you.
Then they laugh at you.
Then they fight you. 
Then you win. 

Four simple steps.  The good news -- we have already taken the first.  Got that one down pat.

Liberation 101: 

We are in charge of the map.  The oppressor doesn't decide that oppression will end.  It endures until the oppressed decide that it will end.

What we have to do is provoke the next step.

Then they laugh at you.

Well, that's where we are stuck, because we are unwilling to be laughed at.  Last month's NAMI meeting was about Iowa's upcoming budget cuts.  Somebody said, When we complain, they say we are crazy.  I think she is a therapist.  She has that therapist look, if you know what I mean.

Therapists say the funniest things.  When we complain about how we are treated, they say we are crazy.

But we are crazy!  We start off ahead of all the other liberation movements that had to get crazy to take it to Gandhi's next step.

Think Martin Luther King.  Think Nelson Mandela.  Freedom?  People called them communists.  Either that or just plain nuts. 

Like these other movements, we have to find a spiritual taproot deep enough that we can endure being laughed at.  Just like the tree, standing by the water... 

The spiritual work will be impossible if we expect our care providers to lead.  They get twitchy if we talk spirituality.  I will address that work another time.  Right now I will sketch out how we break beyond First they ignore you, and move to Then they laugh at you.

What that means more precisely is, we have to do things to make people think we are nuts.  Like, DEMAND that we receive funding for research and treatment, DEMAND that we have the same access to health care as anybody else, DEMAND that we receive our health care in health care facilities, not in jails.

It's all about budget cuts right now.  Corporate tax cuts -- that's a given.  Corporations spent good money for our current crop of legislators, and they expect a return on investment.

So who will pay for these tax cuts, the people with mental retardation or the people with mental illness?  The Iowa State legislature has a committee that has asked us to decide.  Well, isn't that special.

We have to DEMAND that they change the rules of this game.  We have to REFUSE to play Survivor.  We have to refuse LOUDLY.

How?  African Americans sat down.  That is when they moved off Step One, when they REFUSED to be ignored any more.

So how about we lie down?


Lie In/Die In

Picture this.  The next Loonie Lobby Day at the state legislature, we don't get all showered and neatly normaled up and go have sincere conversations with our legislators who are really sympathetic (their brother has depression, so they know what we are up against, but their hands are tied by that pesky deficit...)

Instead, we stand in the rotunda and read off the names of their constituents who have committed suicide.  Each time a name is read, somebody falls down.  They have to step over our bodies to get out of the building.

Mental Health "Parity"
 
The Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act would be better called the Swiss Cheese Mental Health Act.

1) Only large employers are affected.

2) If they can demonstrate it causes them financial hardship, they can get an exemption.

3) Parity is a laugh anyhow, if reimbursement rates are so low you can't find a provider who accepts your insurance.

4) The provisions of even this piss poor legislation that address reimbursement rates are now the top of the list on Congress's chopping block.

So off we head to Washington.  There are 13,000,000 million of us with serious mental illnesses in the US, including 5.7 million with bipolar, 2.4 million with schizophrenia and 7.7 million with PTSD.  The numbers add up to more than 13,000,000, because some of us get to double dip.  Piece of cake to pull together 34,000 to do a die-in around the steps of Congress, representing one year's worth of the deaths by suicide in the US.  We will drape American flags over the bodies of the vets.

Yes, we are dying out here.  Let them step over us.

How nuts are we to think we can turn around this systemic discrimination?  In this political climate?

Progress Report

Remember, When we complain about how we are treated, they say we are crazy?  By now some of my readers seriously want me to reconsider Seroquel.  Others -- if you are still reading, your doc wants you to up your dose.  This means we are making progress.

At some point, laughter becomes a cover for scared.  Then it's time for the next step.

Then they fight you.

Remember, this is our map.  We are the ones who push it forward.  Nobody else will.  And if I am scaring you, look at it this way.  If we aren't scared already, we'd have to be crazy.

Until we change our advocacy, we will continue to lose psychiatrists.  We currently have less than half the psychiatrists we need to provide a even a shoddy level of token med checks.  In Iowa, we have one fourth.  While demand is going up (think Iraq, think Afghanistan), supply is going down, as retiring psychiatrists are not replaced by new doctors.  Why go that far in debt to get through med school and then choose a specialty with the lowest pay scale on the block?

Until we change our advocacy, we will continue to lose community mental health centers.  Remember community mental health centers?  The places we were supposed to go when they kicked us out of the hospital?  They are disappearing already.  Here are the Kansas numbers.  You can find the same story for any state you google.

Until we change our advocacy, we will lose what parity was promised.  Again, all employers have to do to avoid it is demonstrate that it costs them money to provide it.

Until we change our advocacy, we will lose even the programs that jails now provide.  Why should criminals be coddled?

Desperate Times Call For Futile Gestures

What were we thinking?  That public demonstrations would make a difference to cold hard facts?  Were we nuts?  (By the way, what have we been thinking, that talking would make a difference?)

After the strategies designed for Then they laugh at you prove futile, we up the ante.  In place of our bodies, we substitute urns full of ashes and dump them on the floor of the assembly halls.

In 1987 AIDS activists entered the New York Stock Exchange.  Seven people unobtrusively chained themselves and a banner to the rail overlooking the trading floor.  At the opening bell they unfurled their banner and blew fog horns.  They drowned out the opening bell, and prevented traders from trading, while they brought national attention to their demand that pharmaceutical companies stop profiteering at the cost of their lives.

Wall Street is our audience, too -- all the businesses that insure some of their employees but not us, all the health care companies that pay reasonable reimbursement to some doctors but not ours.  How about we bring ambulance sirens? 

A Day Without Mental Health Care 

Next we head to Main Street.

The 2004 film A Day Without A Mexican imagined what would happen if one day everybody in the US from Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, et al disappeared.  Economic havoc, that's what.  A few years later, the movie inspired a political demonstration.  Workers stayed home for a day.  In some places, restaurants simply closed for the day, unable to serve their customers.

So last week the Wall Street Journal reported a survey by Workplace Options.  The survey discovered that 41% of workers polled had taken 4-9 days off work in the previous year to care for their own, their friends', their coworkers' or family members' mental health issue.  Half work in offices with no benefits, support or services to deal with mental health issues.

They think they can't afford to provide services?  They haven't a clue how much it already costs them not to. 

There you have it, a National Day Without Mental Health Care.  Everybody who has a mental illness or loves somebody who does -- stay home.  I'm thinking Monday -- to make that moon connection, and maybe even disrupt Monday Night Football?

Going To Jail

At this point, we are littering, destroying property and generally disturbing the peace.  We are going to jail.

Everybody on a three-month wait list for an intake interview,

Everybody on a two-year wait list for the judicial review of an SSDI application,

Everybody on a four-year wait list for sheltered housing,

Everybody who had been doing okay, but stopped taking meds when the day program closed,

Everybody who can't afford the copay for that third tier prescription anyway,

Everybody who doesn't have health insurance at all,

Everybody who is homeless,

Go downtown and set a trash can on fire.

We Need Some Coordination Here

No, not everybody.  Jail is not a good place for people with OCD, PTSD, nor Borderline.  You all, your part is to run right down to the courthouse, legal brief in hand, to make sure the police department fulfills its obligation to get the rest of us our meds.

Prejudice And Oppression -- Some Observations

This post has been about fighting oppression, the institutional arrangements that support an unjust system.  Oppression is weighty.  It is fierce.  It does not respond to reason.  Power yields only to power.  The strategies and actions I have described are the power of anger that has been organized.

Our families and our care providers are just as scared as everybody else of our anger.  So they will not help us here.  They want to address prejudice, not oppression. 

Prejudice is the irrational thoughts and feelings of individuals.  Well, prejudice also needs to be addressed.  There is work enough for everybody.  Think of differential diagnoses as differential skill sets for the differential tasks of freedom-fighting.

That's coming next week...

banner from nami.org

image of prison bars from microsoft

photo of Mahatma Gandhi in public domain 

flair from facebook

forest photo by Maylene Thyssen used under the GNU Free Documentation license

sit in at Walgreen's in Nashville, Tennesee, March 25, 1960, in public domain

photo of die in casualties by Brendan Themes and used under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license

fist graphic in public domain